ADELAIDE prankster David Thorne says his latest stunt to make waves in the digital world highlights problems with Facebook's privacy settings.

Thorne last week created a hoax event listing on the social networking site that appeared to be a private birthday party for one "Kate Miller".

The event was to take place at Miller's apartment and had, seemingly, been left open to public viewing instead of set to private by accident.

Pretending that he had stumbled across the event, Thorne sent a link to his Twitter followers urging them to "hit attending & give the host an aneurysm".

More than 60,000 people RSVP'd to the event before it was taken down by Facebook.

Thorne said he created the hoax to show how quickly events could go viral through sites like Facebook and Twitter.

"It's like throwing a pebble into a pond and watching thousands of people jump in after it," he told news.com.au.

However the prankster said the stunt also had a serious side.

"An invite to a private event takes approximately three minutes to create on Facebook and the button to mark it as private is easily skipped," Thorne said.

"While Facebook has done much to simplify its usability, its privacy settings are still quite confusing for general users."

There are two ways of making an event on Facebook. The easiest of the two requires that users create the event first, then go into it and edit its settings if they want it to be private — which many may forget to do.

Thorne said the best way to protect your privacy on sites like Facebook was to treat all of your information as public in case of mistakes.

"It's important, regardless of individual privacy settings, to treat all information that you include on these social networking sites as completely public and include personal information appropriately," he said.

Thorne said Facebook seemed to have pulled the plug on the original event after someone created an account pretending to be an angry Kate Miller.

"Everyone enjoyed the exercise, so I can only assume that when someone created a fake account pretending to be Kate Miller upset, Facebook turned off the stereo and told everyone to leave," he said.

However the demise of the original event has only spurred on its fans, who have created more than 500 extra pages in the spirit of "Kate's Party".

They include: "Is going to try to get with Kate at Kate's Party", "We met at Kate's Party", "Kate's party would have gone off" and "Where did all these Kate's party groups come from!?"

News.com.au's Privacy Policy includes important information about our collection, use and disclosure of your personal information (including to provide you with targeted content and advertising based on your online activities). It explains that if you do not provide us with information we have requested from you, we may not be able to provide you with the goods and services you require. It also explains how you can access or seek correction of your personal information, how you can complain about a breach of the Australian Privacy Principles and how we will deal with a complaint of that nature.